What do I think or get upto as Oracle Professional, UKOUG Board Member, ACE Director?
The intention is not to explain everything in detail but to link to existing information that may be of interest.

Saturday, 18 May 2013

Don't give up on UKOUG

Twitter is
currently full of comments about UKOUG and it is very difficult to explain
what I think in 140 characters so I'm writing this blog to try and explain.

I've worked with UKOUG on either its board or the council
for the last 12 years and I'm passionate about what UKOUG stands for; ‘Serving
the Oracle Community’. The Community is anybody touched by Oracle, and we reach
much of that community, and UKOUG's new President David Warburton-Broadhurst is simply
aiming to widen that reach.

To me UKOUG
need to do 5 things:

Reach our target community

Represent our community

Deliver to our community

Influence Oracle

Manage a successful business

When I
joined the user group in 2001, The Community was very simply defined; UKOUG were
able to bring in more income than UKOUG required running the events UKOUG delivered.

Then things
started to change, the community grew, the Oracle acquisition strategy meant that
the community contained a lot of different Interest groups, a lot more people
who want content from UKOUG and then came the economic downturn.

I believe
David can not only help us with Reach but also with Influence and give us his
expertise in managing a business.

Our Target Community

One of the
areas that UKOUG have always wanted but never really been able to reach was
that the top executives in our user organisations. A few years back UKOUG
introduced our Business & Strategy sessions at the main conference and although
this has given us more senior manager content it hasn't elevated as much as UKOUG
would like. If you look at other user groups around the world they all have
executive tracks.

Many years
ago Ronan and I went to CIO connect and talked about UKOUG and all of the
people that were in the room said that their organisations were members who
sent their staff they didn't think there was any content for them and that's
what David is saying; his company is a member of UKOUG, he pays for his IT
people to attend UKOUG events. He must thinks there is great value for them as
he continues to renew that membership.

But UKOUG
had bigger problems, reaching higher within our existing membership is one
thing, but UKOUG do not have all Oracle users, and as people tightened their
belts, some of our existing members had dropped off.

Represent our Community

Unlike most other user groups UKOUG employ our own staff; UKOUG
do not use a 3rd party. This makes us the envy of many but it also
means UKOUG have a business to run, which I will come back to later, but just
to say that as the business became more complicated the old board was spending
more time on that and not enough representing the community. That was why UKOUG
reduced the size of the board, created the Executive to work with the office
and the Council to work with the Community.

You vote for the Council and I hope UKOUG are working
with you closer.

Deliver to our community

I hope the Council is working with the various
communities to ensure UKOUG are delivering what you want. UKOUG have a number of task groups to help
deliver this and UKOUG have also reached out to other volunteers to be part of
these. This is the most important area
and UKOUG will always find room for improvement and why it is so important to
get your feedback and for volunteers to get involved.

UKOUG have outgrown Birmingham something else that really
annoys me. In the UK we have such a lack of places that provide what UKOUG need,
a place that can have a large plenary session, a large number of breakouts and
a big enough exhibition area and UKOUG cannot continue in Birmingham. UKOUG
have split the conference so that we can grow our reach, and can grow across
all of the things that are part of what Oracle offers. I'm really sad that UKOUG
are no longer having a single conference but that there is no way around it. I
am so jealous of the user groups in the States and in other countries where
their conference centres are plentiful, large and in many cases they are discounted
by the local authority or by the local hospitality industry, that doesn't
happen in the UK, we have to pay top dollar.

Our conferences will be fun, I am leading the group
putting together the Applications conference and Fiona is pulling together the Technology
conference; they are looking good but please, please don't walk away from UKOUG,
give it a chance.

Influence Oracle

UKOUG need
to be able to influence Oracle, this is one of the most important reasons for
being independent, to help shape the way that their products are going in the
future.

From a
feature point of view in the technology UKOUG are doing okay and can show this
is a good examples in Technology, either through relationships between Special
Interest Groups and Oracle Product Management, and UKOUG have many speakers who
we count amongst our volunteers who participate in beta testing of technology.

At an
applications level UKOUG had great traction in the early days of Fusion
Applications but we need more in the wider applications communities. Working
with Oracle at a global level UKOUG recently encouraged members to get involved
in the Customer Advisory Panel.

Oracle wants
to know what organisations need in their products, what will get them to
increase their investment. They have Strategy Advisory Boards and CIO events,
but UKOUG need to be part of this, to get the executive participation from
Oracle and to get sponsorship and participation from the partners that work in
this area. I’ve already said the big user groups who cover Applications have successful
Executive programs and they do have more of an input into applications.

Manage a successful business

I have left
this to last but a hard reality is that UKOUG have to balance the books. Like
it or not but UKOUG has to run a businesses and it has become more and more complicated
because our revenue streams are not matching what it is that UKOUG want to
deliver to our members and therefore UKOUG have to do some really strategic
work to turn that around.

Our income comes
from membership and sales of sponsorship and exhibition. Membership was
dropping but over the last year UKOUG have reversed that trend but we need more
organisations involved.

Sales have
been hit badly, the economic pressures on organisations has hit their budgets
which now need to cover many more streams of marketing, such as social media
etc. The number of partners has also reduced, mainly through acquisition. In
order to retain their marketing budget they have to show a return on their
investment at the time, and the hard truth is that if they feel if they're not
reaching the people who have got the money in an organisation and then not able
to directly attribute any opportunities.

I have seen
on Twitter that people have said it's the technical people influence and they
are absolutely that's right, I seriously believe we wouldn't be buying Engineered
Systems if we weren't listening to the Tanel, Doug and Alex’s of this world.
However that does not give you a lead on the day of exhibiting, and that is
what is being measured.

UKOUG through
good management in the past has healthy reserves but we haven't managed to
bring in enough revenue for the last three years and cannot continue to do that
and so we need to make the hard decisions in our business just like your organisations
have had to do and I hope David will help us with that.

So is David
the right person for the job? I hope so, I really hope so and he looks to have
the skills that UKOUG need to the business acumen to help our organisation grow
and return to profitability; he also has the links in order to get us to step
up and reach out to his peers and bring in the right additional content so UKOUG
can influence Oracle at that top level. His
first interview with the press was not a great start but the emphasis is
completely and utterly wrong, I think the second one is a lot better. But give
him a chance, in this world we see the same news story reported as many
different ways as there are articles, don’t write him off after just two.

UKOUG don't always
get these things right first time, we did make major changes two years ago for the
right reasons and they've done some very positive things, UKOUG need to
continue to change, we need to be agile and do what is necessary to bring UKOUG
not only is be a successful content giver, influence effectively but also be successful
financially.

UKOUG needs
our members to standby us, to support us and to help us; if you think of
something else we need to do or if you think we're doing something wrong then
please come and tell us. Twitter is a great way to give instant feedback but a
quick way to bring us down and I really don't think UKOUG deserve that today. Please
give UKOUG and David a chance.

Finally I
also take this opportunity to ask for your help and support for the conferences
this year. If I didn’t think it would work I would have left UKOUG. Yes, I have
not left UKOUG I am still an elected and active member of the council.

Just to
reiterate, this is Debra Lilley’s thoughts. I'm so passionate about UKOUG I don't want it to
die, we will get there and we will have most wonderful conferences and I look
forward to meeting you there.

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